


make this chaos count

by mascott (ladyfriday)



Series: look at where you are (where you started) [1]
Category: Figure Skating RPF, Olympics RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Tessa-centric, Unplanned Pregnancy, post-Sochi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-05-14 16:47:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14773400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyfriday/pseuds/mascott
Summary: Nothing is okay, she’s going to be a mom in less than nine months, but the lines around his eyes are creasing with concern, and she thinks. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll child proof this house and live here together and eventually they’ll help each other work the poison out of their systems. They’ll raise a beautiful, healthy baby. On weekends, they’ll drive out to the Ilderton skating arena, they’ll skate around with their baby in their arms, in the place where it began. Skating will be fun again. And one day he’ll tell her he loves her and she’ll believe him.Tessa's Post-Sochi spiral ends when she becomes a mother.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hooksandheroics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hooksandheroics/gifts).



> hello! it's mee~ this is the first piece i'm posting this year, which does not bode well for my yearly target, but i'm trying? Tessa and Scott are characters in this fic. their actions/reactions/motivations are all driven by the characterization i've put together for them, in conjunction with some knowledge of how the amateur figure skating lifestyle works. this fic was/is brought to you by Jazz aka hooksandheroics who you may know by the AMAZING fics she's written for me (and all of you) (but mostly me, sorry guys she's MINE). i have so much anxiety about writing, and i'm the most high maintenance writer of all time. at least 5 times a week, i'll be asking her to make decisions for me, and not only does she stay up late to hear me think out loud, but she actively eases my anxiety and makes the hard calls. she makes sure i stay true to my (our) vision, and honestly this fic would absolutely not have happened without her. it literally wouldn't have, i was writing some fluff involving tour and post-Pyeongchang, but she brought me here, and now here we are. my debut in this fandom, i guess. ok, shutting up now, i'll heap some more sappy anecdotes on y'all as they become relevant. 
> 
> tags will go up as they become relevant.
> 
> title: jupiter by sleeping at last

They lose Sochi together, but everything else, Tessa loses alone.

 

 

_It should’ve been gold_ , they hear everywhere they go and it’s flattering until May rolls around and they’re still pretending Seasons had been a fitting end to their fairy-tale career. Romance and love and Mahler but older had been the tall order, and they’d delivered, sure. Technically flawless, no matter the scores, but the story had been love and between them it’d been a disaster.

They aren’t a couple (they’re never a couple). They dance Seasons to Carmen’s rhythm.

“She won’t look at me,” he yells at her but to Marina, and it’s just Scott, hyperbolic and unthinking in his frustration, but she twists up inside, under Marina’s critical eye. Until she puts on fishnets and a lowcut dress, and _yeah_. She finds a sick sort of satisfaction in the angry tension in his jaw.

The last quad is all silver and second best, possession and want that morphs into need, that tears through every bit of a life they attempt with anyone on the outside. Like a forest fire in August, the end is always smoke and felled trees and. Destruction, but that’s where the similarities end, because they may be many things, but they’re never catastrophic. At least, not while silver is good. And it’s fantastic until they remember it’s not gold. That controversy or otherwise, their paltry lies hadn’t deserved it.

Sometimes, when he’s gripping her thighs and trailing his mouth along her neck, she wonders if they’ll ever burn hot enough to cauterize their wounds.  

Clarity comes in the after, in the cleaning up and getting dressed, in the slump in Scott’s shoulders. It’s wrong, she thinks vaguely. It’s not meant to be like this between them. But it always comes down to: she doesn’t know how to not want him when he wants her.

In the spaces between, in the time he spends outside her bed, there’s drinking and bars and sloppy dancing with girls who are not her, in between cross-ocean flights and bus rides across the country. An exclamation point, a middle finger to discipline and everything they’ve said no to for naught. It punctuates a decade of their shared and solitary lives being reduced to cardboard boxes in moving vans driven by strangers.

(They sneak their belongings out of Arctic Edge like thieves in the night.

He aims an old skate guard at Marina’s closed office door. It falls just short of the carved mahogany, ostentatious and imposing and so like Marina, goosebumps dot Tessa’s skin in Pavlovian response. His hand that isn’t tugging the strap of his old Skate Canada gym bag is clenched in a fist. Tessa pries his fingers loose and tugs him away before he decides to throw a punch at that door.

The closed door always wins. They’ve known this since Carmen.)

In the evenings, he has his hands all over anyone who will let him.

But at night, it’s her he comes stumbling back to, slurring, his happiness induced, and maybe she’s had a bottle too many of wine too, because all she wants is for him to touch her. Every night he chooses her is a victory. It’s the only thing she’s got left to win.

 

 

Can festering wounds be cauterized? Tessa doesn’t know.

 

 

She throws her planner into the fire pit in her parents’ backyard, watches as the pages curl in on themselves. The flames lick at the pleather cover, the entire street smells like burnt rubber for the day. It stings her eyes, a low throb settles at the base of her skull. She’d promised her mother that she’d stay for dinner, but the mere idea of roast chicken and potatoes turns her stomach.

Tessa drives home before the table is set, wraps herself in the peaceful solitude that comes from the absence of an immediate purpose. The stack of full-sized manila envelopes on the antique table in her entryway greets her when she unlocks her door. They’ve sat there for the better part of two weeks, tops slit neatly open, embossed with a navy coat of arms from the University of Toronto, a purple crest from Western. It’s her future, devoid of days full of Scott. She walks past it, willful in her ignorance.

He’d stood frozen in her foyer, the last time he’d visited, staring holes into the envelopes, and for the rest of the night, he’d been so _tense_ , she’d felt it in her bones. She’s going to Western, she’s decided already. Staying home, staying here, near Ilderton. Near him, is the truth. She doesn’t tell him.

(She can’t. It feels like power, and she can’t give that up.)

(He might laugh in her face and turn around to the next girl who buys him a drink that he’ll pay for later, and she’s not going to let him have the satisfaction of knowing how he hurts her.)

(Marlene would be so disappointed; _we’ve talked about this, there is no power games in a partnership_ , she would say. But the Olympics are over, their partnership sold jack shit, and she’s so over it.)

Tessa sleeps late and wakes later, eats chocolate chip toaster waffles alone at her kitchen island. She clears out the medicinal half of her cabinets, dumping pills and protein powders and so many goddamn vitamins into a basket and shoving it out of sight in her basement. There’re no more pills to take with her breakfast. And if this means she misses a couple of days of _that_ pill, it’s whatever.

It’s not actually, she takes it religiously, has always taken it with the same brand of devotion she’d given Scott, the fear of a child-sort of responsibility derailing the rest of her life too strong for her to ever forget. But her and Scott, they dance all night long, in her kitchen, on her couch, in her bedroom, her thousand count sheets twisting around her bare legs. Until the bone deep fatigue becomes debilitating enough for her to sleep. In the morning her mind is numb and her planner is ashes stirred into coal, so she tries to remember that pill for herself. And she does, she thinks, she doesn’t miss a day.

She bleeds a little earlier than she’s scheduled to, maybe (probably), and it’s light, barely there. But it’s still blood, and she’s fine. If her breasts are a little sore, it’s normal. She’s worn out at the end of the night, the start of the morning, she’s halfway through an episode of Suits and she’s passing out on her couch, but that’s Scott and his endless fountain of energy versus her depleted well. Maybe she wakes up every morning and hovers over the toilet bowl until there’s nothing left in her stomach, but that’s a given, it says so right there on the box: nausea. Side-effects of the pill that she’s only experiencing now that it’s the only pill she’s taking.

Anxiety’s always sent her dry heaving into change room toilet bowls, and she’s never been much of a bleeder, anyway.

The symptoms stack up, and she knows she isn’t pregnant—she just had her period, mild cramps and all, but Jordan’s visiting soon and she’ll _think_ , and Tessa needs something to throw in her face. She takes four tests, one of each brand from the Shoppers down the street, no sweat. They sit on her bathroom counter, forgotten while she naps, sprawled out on top of her blankets, the vents above cooling the dampness at her neck, in the bend of her knees. Scott doesn’t come over that night, doesn’t wake her up, whiskey and beer and vodka saturating his breath, stabbing her doorbell until she answers.

He doesn’t text her, either. And Tessa could ask him where he is, but—she doesn’t want to know.

She doesn’t need to talk to him for that. Photos from his night out are splashed all over his Facebook page when Tessa pulls up her feed, his friends tagging him when the girls don’t, because Scotty’s got _game_. The pecan pie she’d scarfed down before she’d fallen asleep rebels in her stomach, her laptop clatters to the floor, still open faced to Scott’s mouth on dark haired Mina Fischer’s neck, his hands on her hips, his eyes closed and _so_ into it.

The artisan pie that had been the best when she’d eaten the entire thing in one sitting is poison when it comes back up. Tessa collapses in a heap in front of the toilet, the tile sticking to her bare legs. She clutches the edges of the bowl, the porcelain cold against her fingers, retching until her insides are torn apart. Until there’s nothing but bile left inside of her.

She stays crumpled on the floor until her racing heart settles enough that she can breathe. Pulling herself up with the bathtub for support, she’s walks to the sink on quaking legs. She runs the water until it’s liquid ice, cups her hands in it and splashes her face until she’s awake. Her mouthwash has dwindled down to near dregs, she rations out a half cup and rinses, spearmint stinging her gums.

She spits, and she’s reaching for a hand towel when the double pink lines catch the corner of her eye. A row of tests, all variations of the same. Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant, she’s goddamned pregnant.

A hallucination, she thinks numbly, it must be a hallucination. She’s been so damn careful. Her entire life, all she’s done is be careful.

Tessa inhales sharply, and the distant smell of the egg she’d fried that morning wafts through the open bathroom door. She scrambles for the toilet, her hair falling around her face as her stomach throws away the nothing it has left. Bile fights its way up her throat bitter and caustic. She retches, and she retches and when she catches sight of the tests, her legs give out once more.

She doesn’t get up for a long while.

 

 

In her head, this is how it goes:

She invites him over around midday, he shows up a half hour behind schedule—late, but close enough that she calls it a win. He’s freshly showered, but he hasn’t shaved. He’s got three-day scruff around his mouth, dark smudges underscoring his eyes. The previous night’s alcohol has burned its way out of his system; he’s a little hungover, but he isn’t drunk. He’s tired enough to more resemble the Scott of years past than the one she’s become accustomed to. No swagger or pride, just the boy who’d promised to take care of her forever.

“Have you eaten?” he asks, because he’s always concerned.

She shakes her head. She doesn’t think she can stomach much of anything. Scott walks past her to the kitchen, rummages around her empty cabinets and emptier fridge, shaking his head as if he’d expected to find anything else. But he’s gentle and caring, and when she tugs him out of the kitchen to sit on the couch, he’s alarmed, and there’s a furrow in his brows when he asks:

“Is everything okay?”

Nothing is okay, she’s going to be a mom in less than nine months, but the lines around his eyes are creasing with concern, and she thinks. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll child proof this house and live here together and eventually they’ll help each other work the poison out of their systems. They’ll raise a beautiful, healthy baby. On weekends, they’ll drive out to the Ilderton skating arena, they’ll skate around with their baby in their arms, in the place where it began. Skating will be fun again. And one day he’ll tell her he loves her and she’ll believe him.

“I’m pregnant,” she tells him, her voice small.

He freezes, his back stiffening, his fingers twining into knots. “Is…is it…mine?”

That he has to ask—stings a little. But she’s never told him, has she, that for the longest time, it’s been him and only him for her. Tessa nods.

He swallows. “I’m going to be a dad? We’re going to be parents?”

“Yeah,” she reaches for his hand, “So we have to get it together, Scott, okay? We can’t keep doing what we have when there’s a baby. No more drinking, no more—”

She bites the inside of her cheek. “No more partying.” _No more random girls_ , she doesn’t say, but she thinks he might understand anyway.

“Our baby,” he reaches for her, pulls her into him. She inhales deeply, feels him breathing in time with her. He doesn’t promise her with words, but she feels it in the way he holds her to him with a hand on the back of her head. Like she’s infinitely precious, and it must be the pregnancy hormones; tears sting her eyes.

But that fantasy ends with him being acceptably late; four hours later, he still hasn’t arrived, and every bit of optimism Tessa had scrounged up is gone.

The sky is tinged pink by the time the orange and turquoise Beck cab pulls up to her curb. The absence of optimism turns into dread, settling heavily in the pit of her belly. If he’s not driving, he’s probably already stopped for a _good time_.

“What’s up?” he asks, staring at the cleared surface of her entryway table. She’d packed the acceptance letters into her filing cabinet. The baby—complicates things, Tessa isn’t sure what her future will look like, with a baby attached to her hip and. Staring at that future she’d planned, _created_ for herself, every time she comes home has the nausea rearing its ugly head.

“Did you have some place else to be, or…?” she asks conversationally. But he knows her tone. He looks up at her slowly, evenly. Daring her to push back. Tessa’s heart sinks.

“Are we in Canton? Is there practice time we’re missing out on?” He cards his fingers through his hair, and she hates the way the gel shifts so it sticks up on one end. Her fingers itch to smooth it out, and she shouldn’t want to. When he’s like this, she shouldn’t want anything to do with him. But it’s her damn heart, tripping up because his eyes are still dark when he looks at her.

She could have anyone, she thinks. Screw her stupid heart.

(It’s a hyperbole; she doesn’t know how she’d even go about seducing anyone anymore, when she can’t even be enough for a man who’d parroted love to her for a decade and a half.)

“Why are you such a buzzkill?” he pushes past her and sinks onto her couch.

Tessa holds herself stiff, suffocating her flinch. He could be so— _mean_ , sometimes. More, in the summer, when he spent most of his time with his cool friends. More when she’d stood between him and them, practical and boring, but with enough of a hold on him to pull him her way, like his hands on her hips, guiding her into turns on the ice. Time and time and time again he’d caved and followed her lead, and that had been everything to her.

“I’m worried about you. It doesn’t really seem like you have a plan for what you’re going to do now that we’re not skating anymore, and I don’t know. Don’t you think it’s a waste to spend the rest of this year wallowing over Sochi? We should be moving on. Moving forward.”

For their child’s sake, she’s gearing up to say, but he’s laughing at her.

“Not this again,” he shakes his head, “The Olympics are over, Tess. Give me a break.”

“A break from what? You’ve been on a break ever since we got back from Russia.”

“I’ve given you the best years of my life, my goddamn childhood I spent looking after you,” he snaps, “And we couldn’t even make good on gold, so yeah. I’m taking a break. I’ve wasted enough of my time on shit that doesn’t even matter.”

“What is it that doesn’t matter?” she asks sharply, and flinches because this isn’t what she’s supposed to do. No provocations, only steady communication, it’s what they’d practiced for so long, but Tessa’s trying to remember why she’s always the one that has to mold her self to his moods. And—he’d been the better skater, more gifted, the once-in-a-generation talent, and so she’d had to match him and take it because where else would she find a better partner, Marina echoes in her mind, except Marina’s gone, their games are finished and she doesn’t even know why for _anything_ , anymore.

“You don’t get it do you?” he laughs, but it’s a bitter, humourless sound, “All that time we’ve spent with mental coaches and nutritionists and therapists—what the fuck did they do? We were never going to be good enough, and maybe if I hadn’t wasted so much of my time on that, then I would have something more than regrets leftover.”

“What do you regret, Scott?” she feels small as a mouse. Miraculously, her voice is steady.

“Everything,” he spits out, “Every damn thing we’ve done since Vancouver. Every night out I skipped, every date I turned down, every girl I didn’t take home with me because I had to wake up in the morning and pretend to be in love with you. I’m tired, Tessa. I’m tired of waking up at four in the fucking morning because my body clock is so fucked up, I can’t even get some decent rest.”

“So that’s what you want, then? For this,” she waves her hand between them, “to be over?”

He exhales loudly. “I just want my life back.”

“You’re twenty-six years old, Scott. You’re not old, but you’re not young either. Don’t you think you need to plan for what you’re going to do in the next year? Maybe not right away, but in a few months. Rest, and then—”

They’ll have their baby and they need figure this out before this nightmare consumes an innocent child alive.

“I’m sick,” he scrubs his hands over his face. “I’m so sick of you and your useless plans. I don’t need you to police me anymore. Find someone who does.”

Tessa curls her fingers into her palms, her nails bite into her skin, scarred a hundred times over by the slice of her skate blade. The familiar sting centres her, her world snaps into focus. He doesn’t want responsibility, he isn’t ready for it. And a child is so much heavier than their Olympic dreams had ever been.

(He’s not ready. She’s scared, but he’s not ready for the responsibility, and she tries to visualize an end, a positive end. But she can’t.)

“Okay,” she says quietly. “I’ll do that.”

“Cool,” he gets up, “Let me know how that goes. We can probably cut our skating time down to once a week at the club, we don’t have any shows booked for the next while.”

“No,” she says, and it’s visceral, the word ripped from her chest. “Virtue and Moir, Tessa and Scott, you and me? I’m done. There’s too much at stake in my life for me to be dragged down with you.”

She turns away from him. “Have a nice life, Scott.”

He leaves without another word.

 

 

They’ve had their fair share of fights. Harsh and brutal and burning out in a breath, smothered by apologies on a therapist’s couch, until. Carmen, she supposes, but that’d been a study in method acting.

(After; therapy had become motions, slotted into their lives like sit-ups in reps of ten.)

It’s not unusual. They’d spent the largest part of their lives attached at the hip, forcibly or otherwise. They would’ve been saints if they’d never sniped at each other, raised their voices at one another. If they’d never clobbered the other with the weight of an angry silence or drawn blood with short, terse replies. His fury had always been explosive, her temper turned her to ice, and with any other partner, their long hours would’ve been filled with passive aggressive sniping.

She’s not sure if that would’ve been worse. Sometimes she wishes he would just. Stop talking and think for once in his damned life.

The whole of the last two years runs together into one never-ending argument, competitions marking ceasefires that never stuck. Tessa doesn’t know when it’d started, just that the summer had been sweltering and Jason and Mark and Alexander had been so far away, and Scott kept saying she deserved better, and she’d taken it to heart and kissed him. Or maybe he’d kissed her; the kisses tend to blur together these days, like the earliest years of her life. They must’ve happened, she must’ve been Tessa years before the and-Scott had suffixed her name, but she can’t remember how it’d all began.

She’s had older men, mature men, men who know where to put their hands and their mouths, with so much more experience than serial monogamist Scott could ever have, but somehow. Somehow, he’s always known where to touch her first and how to finish her best, without her ever needing to tell him.

(Not a monogamist when it comes to sex; his insatiable hunger driving him from bed to bed to bed. She used to look at him and see loyalty but she can’t remember what it’d been about him that’d let her depend.)

(They never talked, during. Self-imposed distance, she’d smothered her voice with a pillow, just to keep him _there_.)

He’s been her legs and her crutch, through surgery and failure. Through silver Gothenburg and golden Vancouver and that singular Worlds bronze that’d been the end of the world for one furious, helpless summer. So stupid; she’d take that scrap of rust over the faux glamour of her Sochi hardware any day. She’d had him, then; hovering, smothering and so overtly protective after her surgery, she’d been suffocated.

No question; she’d take it over silence and absence and fights that have no reason to end.

 

 

She shouldn’t have been so—definitive.

_Have a nice life_ is a line in wet concrete, permanent and resolute when the dust settles. It’d been a _do this, or else_ , and that’s not. It’s not what she’d meant to do. Scott has never done well with ultimatums, habitually falling on the _or else_ side of the line when she’d told him to _do this_ , except when it’d come to their careers, but their career is over; there will be no more competitions, no more tours for the near future, not when there’s a baby, and now.

There’s no promise of glory, of standing ovations and cheering crowds and shining medals to entice him.

He drinks and parties and she stays willfully away from Facebook, but she knows.

Tessa thumbs through her stack of parenting literature, side by side with course catalogs, her bare ankles propped on the glass of her coffee table. The bottoms of her feet are leaving smudges, and it nags at her like a mosquito bite in the point of her elbow, but. She’s practicing mess; for their baby, who won’t ever have to hear _no_ to putting sticky hands on furniture.

She plans for their future. She waits.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it's been a long while hasn't it? I can make about a hundred excuses--some of them are quite legit actually, but the tl;dr of it is that this chapter is a bit long and it took me much longer to write than I had planned for. Let me tell you, I struggled to write most of it. In the end, it really wouldn't have gotten finished had it not been for Jazz. Seriously, this fic is property of her, and I owe every word of this to her. 
> 
> Heads up: I may be changing the names of some rl people, just because their characterizations in this fic might not be the kindest. the first victim is one of Tessa's brothers, who has been named Richard. Just a heads up, in case that might be jarring.
> 
> Okay, it's been long enough. I'll leave you to it and check back if you make it to the end. :P

To the surprise of no one else, her dad falls in love.

She’s his thirty-year old assistant, a single mom of three and he wants to be there for those children, now that his own are grown. Casey has his own family in Calgary, Richard has his career. Jordan is in Australia, and Tessa has school and. Her world has been her own since she’d packed her barely-teenaged life into suitcases and moved into a stranger’s house. (And now she has the baby, but that’s her secret, will remain her secret because she’d wanted to share her news with people who would be happy for her, but what even is her family when her dad can choose a new one as easily as he’d picked out a couch for his basement man cave.)

There’s just her mom. Her mom who’d fought a class full of men through law school, who’d passed the bar, still round with Casey. Who’d cooked and cleaned and taken care of one overly-energetic boy and then Richard shortly after, all while working cases at the local clinic. Her mom who’d travelled back and forth across the border every time Tessa had been homesick, just to make Canton work.

“Is it physical?” she asks, her voice low, her fingers clutching the tablecloth. “There’s love in our family, so tell me what that woman can do for you that we can’t.”

Her dad forks a piece of steak into his mouth, chews silently for a minute. Tessa has never been one for violent rage, throwing skate guards and carving holes into the ice with an angry stab of a toe pick had always been Scott. But she has to wrap her shins around her chair legs to keep herself from leaping across the table and slamming his plate onto the ground, half-finished stack of potatoes and all, because what kind of a person does this over a meal cooked by the woman he’d used for his _whole damn life_?

“Your mom and me…there’s no love left in this family, sweetheart. You won’t know because you’ve been gone for so long, but. There hasn’t been anything between your mother and I for a long time.”

Richard is infuriatingly silent, separating his peas from his carrots, the kind of composed she’s supposed to be, but it’s Scott leaking into her life, inking her heart across her sleeve.

“That’s a lie,” her voice quivers; Tessa hates that she’s shaking, but she can’t stop, _shit_. “That’s a goddamned lie, you were there in Sochi. We were all there, we were a family. There was _love_.”

“Sochi was for you,” he sets his fork down. “Your mother and I got married for Casey and then there was the rest of you kids, and we stayed together because we loved you. But even if we’re parents, we’re still people. You kids are grown now, can’t you understand if we’re trying to do what makes us happy?”

“You mean you,” Tessa spits out. “You’re the one that’s having an affair, not Mom. You’re the one that wants a new family.”

“You’re not a parent, Tessa. You’ll understand when you have children of your own. I love your mother for what she’s done for you kids, but from me to her—there’s nothing. I don’t need her, and she doesn’t need me. All she needs is you. But Erin is—I _need_ her. And she needs me.”

Tessa has had enough.

“You’re right, dad. Maybe all she needs _is_ me. But guess what? I don’t need you. You want to replace Mom? You’d better replace me, too.” She stands up, her chair screeching against the wooden floor, always freshly polished, always well maintained because that had been the perfect life her mom had built for her dad. For all of them.

“C’mon, Mom, pack your things. You’re not staying in this house with him.”

Her mom clutches her hand like it’s a lifeline. “Okay.”

Tessa’s eyes sting.

“Don’t make things worse,” Richard warns, as they leave. Tessa doesn’t see how she possibly could.

 

 

“It’s different this time,” her mom says, hands wrapped around a steaming mug of tea.

They sit on Tessa’s couch, her mom’s legs folded flat against the pleather upholstered couch cushions, Tessa’s knees tenting the singular throw draped over both their legs. Tessa sips her lemon flavoured hot water. Her mom just stares.

“I think he actually loves her.” Her voice is barely a whisper.

“He doesn’t,” Tessa looks away, her lips pressed tightly together. There’s no anger, no grief in her mom, just defeat radiating off her. Tessa can’t bring herself to look. “He just thinks he does—she’s his assistant, isn’t she? So she’s young, way too young for him, and he just—”

“Not that young,” her mom cuts her off, “She used to be a paralegal, before that she was an accountant, and even before that she was a musician. She sang on patios in the summer, still does sometimes.”

“So what,” Tessa begins again, “What you and dad have…you were so solid, mom. If that isn’t worth something, then what is?”

“She’s an artist. Your dad says she inspires him.” Her mom wraps her arms around herself. “He said that you would understand that the most, and since I’ve always supported you with Scott, I should do the same with him.”

“That’s bullshit!” She means to yell, but it comes out strangled, her throat tight, tears stinging her nose. “What I understand is loyalty! No matter what, Scott and I have always chosen each other. I had my legs cut open _twice_ , because I had no use for a career that didn’t involve him. Scott had so much money thrown in his face from partners who were younger than me, healthier than me, and he refused them all because he wanted to skate only with me. Dad doesn’t get to use artistry and inspiration to justify what he’s done. Artistry and loyalty aren’t one or the other!”

Except—except, except, except, that’d been a lifetime ago. Scott hadn’t chosen her when she’d tried to ask him on this next eighteen-year journey, and maybe she’d given up too soon. But he’d walked out and not looked back, she checks her phone every hour on the hour, wishing for a voice mail, a missed call, a text message, anything, and she’s disappointed every time.

She’s always been a moth to a flame when it comes to the bad sort of pain. It’s what had her practicing and practicing and practicing until she could match Scott, until she’d ripped her legs apart. It’s what has her pulling up his Facebook page when her mom has gone to sleep. It’s what has her flipping through every single one of the photos he’s been tagged in, watching the days since she’d last seen him flip by, wishing for an end. It doesn’t come.

She wilts.

“You should be the one to leave him,” she tells her mom, over and over. “You’re the most amazing—you could have _anyone_.”

Her mom doesn’t nod along, but she doesn’t disagree either, and it’s slow going, but Tessa can see the defeat slowly slipping off her mom’s shoulders, a layer at a time.

When her mom sets a plate of ricotta pancakes in front of her on the third morning, Tessa knows they’ve turned a corner. Her stomach is empty, the insides of her throat still ache from the last of her morning sickness, caustic with bile. But her mom is puttering around her kitchen, her car keys are set precisely on the corner of her kitchen island, the full bag of groceries propped against the base spelling awareness of the state of Tessa’s pantry and motherly concern. An ownership of this place they could both make a home for each other and— _the baby_. 

“You really do need to take better care of yourself, Tessa. You can’t just live off eggs and Wanda’s pies.”

“I won’t,” Tessa smiles. It’s the first genuine happiness she’s felt in days. “As long as you’re here.”

Her mom cups the side of her face, so gently. “It’s time for me to go home, sweetheart.”

“To pack up the rest of your things?” Tessa nods. “That’s really good, mom. You can stay with me, it’ll be like back when I was trying to do high school in Windsor. Just the two of us.”

 _Three_ of them, Tessa corrects in her head. Because it’s them against the world now, because soon, when the dust has settled, she’ll tell her mom, and they’ll figure this out together. Like the fire in her legs and the baby fat around her midsection that had Marina and Igor shaking their heads, her mom will make sense of it.

But she’s shaking her head. “No, honey. I’m going home to stay. Your dad—he’s not perfect, but I’ve made my mistakes too. I’ve spent so much of my time focused on you and your dreams, that I’d forgotten about him. I want to make things right.”

“I want to focus on him,” she shakes her head. “No, I want to focus on _myself_. You have a life of your own to figure out now, just like Casey and Richard and Jordan did. And I have figure out what’s important for me, now that all my children have left the nest.”

It’s insanity. But her mom refuses to budge, and when Tessa pushes back, her mom’s resolve turns to steel. Silently, she pulls out her phone and taps out a text message. It isn’t until Richard’s BMW pulls into Tessa’s driveway that she realizes it’s over. And he’s just standing on her porch, elbow braced against the frame, an infuriating easy grin making light of this colossal mess.

“What is _wrong_ with you,” she begins, out of breath and furious. “How can you just take her back to him like he isn’t cheating on her?”

“Butt out,” he shoves past her, “You don’t know a thing of what our parents are like.” 

Tessa remains frozen by the door, her mind registering her mom’s lips on her cheek as she says goodbye, but feeling nothing at all.

 

 

It’s Richard who calls her the next day, and for a handful of vindictive, resentful moments, she considers letting it go to voicemail. But he’s whispering into the phone, asking her to come to the house because Dad is gone, and Tessa loves being right, always has, but this isn’t something she’d ever wanted to gloat about.

Her dad’s car is absent from the driveway when she pulls in, and she wants to say it’s conspicuous. And perhaps it is, it seems like something that _should_ be conspicuous. But she hasn’t been here enough to know if he’s usually home at this time, and isn’t that telling?

Her mom is curled up on the sofa, bowl of soup sitting untouched on the coffee table in front of her. There’s no coaster underneath it, and when Tessa pushes it away from the edge, there’s a water ring on the glass surface. It’s jarring and out of place; in childhood, she’d be sent to her room for her muddy hands and muddier shoes tracking brown prints all over the floor, for her fingers splotching the white walls and whiter furniture like abstract art. The disarray of the place she’d hardly called home makes her mouth go dry. Her eyes flit to the hallway, expecting a ghost, someone to deliver punishment.

There’s no one.

Richard paces a hole across the living room floor, until their mom falls into Tessa’s arms. She doesn’t know when he leaves, just that when she looks up, he’s gone and there’s a quiet beeping from the alarm system, warning them of the open back patio door.

“Leave him,” she pleads, “Please, Mom. Let’s find a lawyer and file the papers. _Please_.”

But her mom doesn’t have it in her today and Tessa can’t push. She strokes her hair until she falls asleep, and when she pulls the comforter over her mom’s shoulders, dims the table lamp and silently shuts the door, she can’t help but feel—well, maternal. Which is rationally ridiculous, because if motherhood was just about caring, she would’ve felt that mythical pull, ages ago. She wouldn’t have recoiled at every mention Scott made of his future kids, because he’d wanted them and maybe she’d never earn the right to be a mother, so hadn’t that just been a sign that they were never meant to be? But if it’s just _this_ , wanting to make life better for her family, trying mundane things because she thinks it might help, maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe the baby isn’t completely screwed with her for a mother.

(And Scott’s off pickling his liver in alcohol, so maybe he hadn’t known what he’d been on about when he’d talked about his future children like they’d be his tomorrow. Like he could actually be there for them like he’d promised to be there for her.)

There’s a lull in her breathing, a calm, regulated rhythm to her heartbeat.

It doesn’t last. She turns the corner to the kitchen, and Richard’s standing there, hands braced on the countertop.

“This is your fault,” he says furiously, “It’s always been your fault.”

Tessa doesn’t say a thing. She’s never figured out how to _really_ talk to him without hurting, never known what to say when he’s mad, and she’s never seen him so angry. So she does what she’s best at; she hunches her shoulders, her fingers digging into her still muscled biceps. Lets her body absorb the impact, heart racing with adrenaline, mouth clamped shut to stop her from saying what she shouldn’t.

“It was always you,” he aims a fist at the granite. “Ever since you’ve been born, all Mom’s ever thought about, talked about is you. She quit working for you, she quit taking care of us for you. We got cakes and five friends per birthday party because we needed the money for you and your career. Mom left us for you. She left Dad for _you_.”

“I…” she starts but—what is she supposed to say? It’s true, isn’t it? All of it is true.

She hadn’t even known about the other women.

“You’re so fucking selfish, you know that?” he shakes his head, quieter now. Controlled, with intent now. It pinches bruises into her skin, and years with Marina had thickened her skin, but this still _hurts_. “If it wasn’t for you, we would’ve been fine.”

Tessa swallows, tries to think of something to say, but what? She might tell him that he’s acting like a child, which he is; he’s an adult with his own life, their mom shouldn’t have to fight for that man when he’s treating her like this. Richard doesn’t even live with their parents, he hasn’t since he’d turned eighteen and torn up his acceptance letter from Western so he could go to Queen’s. So for him to want to keep this farce of a marriage between their parents—that’s what’s selfish.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him, “But that’s not a reason for Mom to fight for him. Don’t you care about her at all?”

It’s the wrong thing to say, she knows it even before her words have hit the floor, but the sharp stiffening of his shoulders. He rolls his eyes in exaggerated nonchalance and walks away. “Get over yourself, Tessa.”

(She keeps the lights off in her childhood bedroom, when she climbs upstairs to sleep, but it makes no difference. She doesn’t need to see to know the pictures are there. Scott and her, in varying stages of their youth. Freckled and tanned and pale and withdrawn, arms around each other and medals around their necks. In shorts and tank tops, no competitions in sight. Her eyes find the outlines of the wooden frames in the darkness, and her baby is still far too small to move. All the same, her stomach flutters, and Tessa smiles softly.

She wonders if the baby will look like she had.)

 

 

Tessa can’t understand her mom.

She can’t understand the grief that keeps her buried under the blankets, a permanent imprint on the bed she’d shared with that man. It’s an illness. She runs cold, shivering, curled into a ball. Tessa tucks herself around her, tries to lend her body heat. She runs hot and feverish, her temples beaded with sweat, her bangs slick and matted. Tessa presses cool, damp hand towels to her forehead, murmurs _it’s going to be okay_.

She makes soup with frozen broth cubes and instructions from the internet, she arranges for the cleaning company to come in two days early to wipe down the film of dust covering every surface in her mom’s always spotless house. Richard is gone again, and Tessa has a purpose. A person to take care of, responsibilities. She checks her phone once a day for a sign of Scott, and when it’s not there, she’s not disappointed, just. Tired. She falls asleep with her arms tucked around her midsection, and it’s not as good a sleep as she’d had after Scott had his hands all over her, but. She might just be doing fine.

Still, for the life of her, she can’t comprehend why it’s so hard for her mom to just cut that man lose when he’d done the same.

“You of all people should understand,” Jordan says, when Tessa brings it up, during their nightly chat. “If you and Scott were just…over, would you be able to say okay and move on with your life?”

“It’s not the same,” she snaps. She wishes her family would stop equating her and Scott to her parents. If Scott had decided to skate with someone else, she would never have allowed herself to wallow the way her mom is.

“Scott and I weren’t married. We hadn’t built an entire life together. We’ve never lived together; our life together has been skating and only skating. We were business partners, not a couple that’s been married for over three decades.”

“Haven’t you? Built a life together, though?” Jordan blows into the speaker pressed to Tessa’s ear. “You’ve committed to each other for over a decade, and you’re barely halfway to thirty. You left all of us, so you could go have that life with him.”

“It’s not the same.” But she can’t explain it. “I don’t understand how she can love a man like that, when he’s using children as an excuse to leave his family for his mistress.”

“Yeah, well,” Jordan sighs, “You’re right about that one.”

(It’s as she’s falling asleep that she realizes. She’d spoken of Scott and her in the past tense. As if they were history.)

 

 

Toronto has the better school. If she takes away the people in this city, her mom, the Moirs, her choice would’ve been Toronto. It would’ve been Rotman, with the better program, the prestige, the connections. Her skating career will pay for her MBA, but it won’t pay for the rest of her life. It won’t give her baby the life she deserves. She needs to set up their future, and Ivey is great, but Toronto offers more money, better funded elementary schools. Better childcare for when she works.

It’s a thought. It’s an option.

 

 

“I’ve been married for so long,” her mom murmurs the next morning, into her toast. Her appetite isn’t back in full force, but she hadn’t said no when Tessa asked her to eat something more substantial than watered down soup, so it’s progress. She’s stupidly proud of herself.

“I don’t know how to _not_ be married.”

“Who were you before Casey? Before that man?”

“I don’t remember,” her mom smiles softly, “I’d loved to fight, I think. It’s why everyone always said I’d make a good lawyer. I was a good negotiator.”

“Don’t you think you owe it to yourself to find that again?” Tessa sits on the edge of the bed and wraps her arms around her mom’s shoulders. “I think you need to figure out what you want to do. Without us hanging over your head. Just focus on being you and not a wife or a mom.”

Her mom pats her hand. “I can’t just stop being your mom because you’re grown. You’ll always be my baby. All of you.”

“Maybe. But you can stop being a wife.”

It’s a thought. Her mom doesn’t say anything more, but it’s an option.

 

 

She doesn’t remember her life without Scott.

He’d loved saying it, had parroted it to friends, in interviews. Her life as she’d known it had been structured around him, around their career. And she’s different from her mom. She’s not giving up pieces of herself to hold onto someone who doesn’t want to belong to her anymore. But she could be. She could choose Western to be closer to Scott, just in case. It would be for him. For that fantasy family she knows he’s not ready for. And it’s not a bad choice, it’s just. Not the right reasons.

She’ll be a mother, but she doesn’t have to be Scott’s—whatever, anymore.  

Tessa is her mother’s daughter, but mistakes are to be learned from, not inherited.

 

 

A week after her dad leaves, her mom turns a corner.

Tessa’s head is halfway in the bowl of the toilet, her stomach feels ripped apart from the inside, when she feels a gentle hand holding her hair back. “Sweetheart, are you sick?”

Tessa shakes her head. “It’s nothing. It’ll pass.”

It does; her mom explains that she’s ready to talk to consider her options, over saltines and flat ginger ale. Like the final piece of a puzzle, the divorce falls into place. Her parents meet with lawyers and negotiate terms while Tessa’s phone remains inconspicuously devoid of anything from Scott. There’s too much going on; she doesn’t have the energy to look him up anymore.

She sends in her acceptance letter to Rotman for the fall and calls up her realtor. She’s got a house to sell and a condo to buy. Two bedrooms in Toronto’s Annex, walking distance from the university, close to the hospital, with a park nearby. Not in a quiet, tree-lined, picturesque neighbourhood like she’d had, but. That’s overrated, she’d rather have convenience and the best facilities she can afford.

It won’t happen if she tries to keep her London house, but it’s okay. That house was a part of a fantasy, and she’s not going to cling to those anymore.

 

 

Tessa’s realtor gives away her pending sale to her mom before she has a chance to sit down and talk her through the—everything. The for-sale sign is going up on her parents’ lawn, and Tessa’s already has a handful of offers. None of them great, most of them treating her home as an investment property, to be rented out to college kids. She’s waiting, but she can’t afford to for much longer.

She’s found her new place already; two bedrooms with a den, and an actual terrace, with glass railings tall enough to be safe for a child, tiled with dark patio stone. It’s not a yard, but in that section of Toronto’s downtown, it’s a luxury.

“I picked Rotman,” she tells her mom, “I know I said I was going to Ivey, but I wasn’t making that choice for me. I want to go to U of T. I want Toronto.”

“But you don’t have to sell your house,” her mom says. “Why can’t you just rent it out for now and use that money to pay your rent there?”

“I’m buying a condo, Mom,” Tessa curls her hands around her cup of warm lemon water. These days, it’s her favourite thing to drink, it settles her stomach when practically everything else makes it rebel. “I’m moving to Toronto for good.”

“For good?” her mom’s face falls. “When did you decide this?”

“A little while ago. After you met with your lawyer the first time.”

“What about Scott? Have you talked to him?”

Tessa flinches. “No, and I’m not going to. Our skating career is over. It’s time for me to move on.”

“For you?” her mom frowns, “Tessa, what’s going on?”

“Scott’s living his own life.” Tessa exhales into her mug, blowing the steam away. “And right now, there’s no room in it for us.”

“Tessa, sweetheart,” the lines around her mom’s eyes deepen. She’s always had such a soft spot for Scott, and she’s loved that about her, about them, but right now, she could _scream_. “It’s Scott. He’s your best friend. If you just up and leave like this, without telling him—can you come back from that?”

“Maybe I can, maybe I can’t,” her voice is sharp. She winces. “But it doesn’t matter, because right now my priority is my baby, and she deserves better. I’m going to give her the best life I can, and I can’t do that if I have a loose cannon like Scott is right now, hanging over my head.”

“Your—” her mom snaps to attention. “Your baby?”

“Yeah,” Tessa says quietly. She hadn’t meant to tell her like this. “I’m pregnant. You’re going to be a grandmother.”

“Is Alexander the father? Are you moving to Toronto to be closer to him?”

“No, Alex and I haven’t been together for a very long time.” And even when they had, she’d spent only the rarest nights in his bed.

Jason had been based out of Detroit and Mark had visited often, they’d cycled through her bed in Canton when she’d needed them, and she’d been satisfied. Alex had understood it, he’d accepted their open relationship for what it was, encouraged her, even. After Dave and the gossip, it’s the only thing that’d helped; owning her sexuality instead of being afraid of what the masses might think. But then she’d had Scott, and. Mark was good and Jason was better, she could talk to Alex for ages, but they could never do for her what Scott had.

“So who is it then?” her mom presses. “Have you been seeing someone new?”

“The baby is mine!” Tessa snaps. “Biologically, I may share her with Scott, but she’s _mine_.”

She regrets it even before she’s finished. It’s not how she’d meant to say it, she’d been combing through Pinterest for ideas on how to announce it, she’d been looking at shirts or a cake or even a bouquet of flowers. They needed good news, something to be excited about so badly, and. This isn’t how it’d gone in her head.

The silence at her mom’s kitchen table is stifling.

“Oh, Tessa,” her mom says finally, and she thinks she might cry. “Sweetheart, you have to tell him.”

“I will,” Tessa turns away. “When he’s ready, I will. If he asks, I will.”

“If he’s this baby’s father, he deserves to know—”

“Being a father is more than donating DNA,” Tessa snaps, “He’s drowning his sorrows in frat boy fun, and he’s not going to stop for me, for anyone. I’m not bringing that into my baby’s life.”

“Tessa, no,” her mom shakes her head, “He’s a good boy, he’s just dealing with a lot right now. He’d make a good father, you know he would.”

“And so am I! I’m going through the exact same thing!” Tessa squeezes her eyes shut. “But I’m trying so hard to get better, get it together before my baby’s born, so she can have the life she deserves.”

She’d already booked appointments with a therapist in Toronto.

“Doesn’t he deserve the same chance? To get his life together for the baby?”

“I asked him. Mom, he doesn’t want to get better, he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with how he’s living.”

“And what about his family?” Her mom presses her hands to her forehead. “Alma and Joe and Danny? Are you going to keep your baby from them, too?”

“No, of course not!” Shutting them out has never been a part of her plan. Her baby will have a whole family of people to love her, no matter if her father is in the picture. “I’m going to tell them soon.”

“And if they tell him?”

“They won’t,” Tessa says resolutely. “They’ll see.”

Her mom sighs, then opens her arms. “Come here. Or are you too big to sit with your Mom now?”

Careful not to crush her, Tessa puts her mug on the coffee table and scoots down the couch, leaning into her mom.

“Don’t do anything you can’t come back from,” her mom says softly, “Scott’s been a part of your life for so long…don’t burn that bridge, sweetheart. It’ll be worse for you.”

“I don’t want to.” Tears sting Tessa’s throat. “But I have to put my baby first now.”

“My baby’s having a baby.” Her mom holds her tighter, strokes the crown of her head. “You’re going to be such a great mom.”

Tessa swallows. She’s still not sure of that, but she’s trying. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll be enough for them.

 

 

The best offer she receives for her house isn’t the right one, but the closing date on her new condo looms. She accepts it and tries not to imagine what a bunch of college kids might do to the home she’d all but built with her own hands. There’re too many variables in her life without having to worry about what the new owner might do to the house that is no longer hers.

A week before the closing date on the sale of her place in London, she drives down to Toronto with her mom in tow, for her first prenatal appointment with an obstetrician who’d come highly recommended, but one that neither of them have met.

“I wish you would stay until the baby’s born,” her mom laments in the waiting room, tastefully decorated, but busier than any doctor’s office she’s been to in London. “Your baby could be born in the same hospital as her parents, if you did.”

Tessa sighs. The last few days have been a repeat of the same. Her mom slyly suggesting that she stay in London, at least for the rest of her pregnancy and her baby’s first few months. “We’ve been over this, Mom. I need to start the MBA in September, if I want to have a hope of finding a job before my money runs out.”

“There’s more than enough money in this family to go around,” her mom grabs her hand, “We can afford to take care of you and the baby.”

“Stop,” she says, tiredly. “Please. I pushed for your divorce, so you could just be you again. Not for you to be saddled with your grown, capable daughter and her baby. You’ve taken care of me for so long—I have a conscience, too.”

Her name is called and her mom squeezes her hand. “I just want to be your mom, that’s all.”

“I want to be my baby’s mom too,” she squeezes back. “If I need help, I’ll ask. But can’t you let me try this out on my own, first?”

“Okay,” her mom nods, the lines around her mouth deepening. “Okay.”

Dr. Gu is dark haired with streaks of white splashed intermittently along her roots. Her fingers are long, her hands bony, but warm when she holds it out for Tessa to shake. She smiles a lot, just enough that it doesn’t feel rehearsed, and Tessa’s never put much stock in the feelings in her gut, but she has a good one about her. Kindness doesn’t mean much in a doctor, when so much of the job is dependent on competence, but for her pregnancy, Tessa had wished for a coach with a little more gentility than Marina. Less alarmist criticism, more hand holding and reassurance.

“The bloodwork confirms it,” she says, “Congratulations, Momma. If all goes well, in a couple of months, you’ll have a baby in your arms.”

They make an appointment for her first prenatal ultrasound scan and leave the office with their purses stuffed full of pamphlets.

The remainder of the week passes in a whirlwind. Jeff is a godsend, coordinating the final deep clean of her condo and furniture deliveries, while Tessa packs up her clothes, her plates and pots and pans, all that she’s taking with her. The furniture she has is too big for her new space; she’s downsizing and childproofing, opting for darker colours that conceal baby handprints, instead of her white-grey couches that cling to stains.

It’s a far cry from what she’d had before. Tessa teaches herself to love it, all the same.

 

 

Dr. Cynthia Ornstein, PhD isn’t Marlene, marriage counsellor. Her office is on the twenty-first floor of a pillar in Toronto’s skyline, made almost entirely of glass. Tall glass windows looking over Lake Ontario’s harbour, offices walled in by glass, turned opaque with the press of a button. Fresh pastries from Nadège sit invitingly on a three-tiered desert dish, multicoloured macarons in miniature tucked between the paper doilies underneath the tarts and glazed slices of cake. It’s a spot of comfort in a space that is otherwise clinical.

Marlene’s had been the main level of a townhouse, a singular desk, a couple of arm chairs and a long three-cushioned couch. The dark wood panelled walls, the heavy antique furniture had given the space a sense of privacy. Cynthia’s office is bright lights, sunshine streaming through windows everywhere. There’s nowhere to hide.

Tessa wants to run, but she has a deadline.

“I have eight months to fix myself,” she tells Cynthia, when she asks about her goals for these sessions.

There’s a reason she’d picked this therapist, this ambience. Lying and concealing from Marlene had been so easy, when all she’d had was privacy. She can’t afford to do that, now. The clock’s ticking and her baby is growing.

“I’m pregnant, you see,” she presses a hand to her lower abdomen, still hard with muscle. “And I’m, in all likelihood, going to be doing this on my own. I need to be healthy and present for my child.”

“Congratulations,” Cynthia says, and Tessa’s heart is pounding nervously, but she’s warm inside. She likes being congratulated for her baby. It’s—real, not condolences like the pats on the back for the silver medal. “So the baby’s father isn’t in the picture?”

“He could be. But right now, he isn’t.”

“Why is that?”

Tessa exhales in a shaky breath. Honesty, she reminds herself. If she lies, she won’t be cheating herself anymore; she’ll be cheating her baby.

She’s got to start somewhere.

 

 

She’s no stranger to being poked and prodded, every part of her body pulled apart and dissected with critical eyes. But her first ultrasound is as nothing she knows. The bed is memory foam, wrapped in an actual sheet, white speckled with blue and yellow flowers. She’s given a checked white and red gown to change into, but it’s a real dress, with pleated short sleeves and a skirt big enough to accommodate bumps of all sizes.

Her legs go up and the probe goes in, as she’s coached by Dr. Gu in soothing tones, to exhale, it’ll only be a while and then she’ll get to see her baby on the black and white screen. She curls her fingers in the fabric bunched around her midsection, to ground herself. She regulates her breathing as she’s done her entire life it feels like, in through her nose and out through her mouth, but she’s missing her crutch. The steady thrum of Scott’s heart to match hers, and she hadn’t been nervous—it’s routine, she’s had scans on every part of her body. It’s why she’d told her mom to stay in London, there’d been too much to do for her to make the drive for just a few pictures, but.

She’s alone, in a hospital room, the rest of her life shrouded in fog, and how is she supposed to find her way when there isn’t his gravity pulling her where she needs to go.

“There they are,” Dr. Gu says softly, “Look at the screen, Tessa. It’s your little son or daughter.”

“Daughter,” Tessa corrects, but her voice is a whisper, because she sees her. Flickering white specs on the screen, barely visible, but proof anyway that she’s tethered to someone. Her child that she hopes will be healthy and happy, no matter what, but she just irrationally, sentimentally _knows_ is a girl.

She exhales in a ragged breath. “Is she…”

She’d had a list of questions, things to verify, diseases to test for, but a rapid whooshing fills the room to overflowing, and Tessa’s read about people crying when they hear their baby’s heartbeat, she’d smiled indulgently when her sister-in-law had talked through it. She’s never thought she’d be one of them. It’s not her; she’s head first, above and over heart. She’s the one listening to make sure all is right, instead of dwelling over meaningless sentimentality, but she _feels_ it in her bones. Her baby’s life, her heart pulling Tessa’s to beat for it.

Relief shudders through her in a silent sob.

“Look at that,” Dr. Gu is smiling all the way up to her eyes. “A healthy heart.”

She’s not alone anymore.

 

 

Tessa is elbows-deep in a plastic storage container of cable knit sweaters, when Danny’s face with Minnie Mouse ears perched on his head flashes onto the screen of her phone. He asks to see her, whenever; lunch, coffee, early dinner—because Ari as at home with their son, Robin and she might have his head if he’s not home by sundown, but _anything_ while the sun still shines. He’s consulting with Brian Orser at the Cricket Club for the day, and he misses her. Or is one idiotic Moir boy going to ruin the rest of them for her, he asks, with a _c’mon, Big Hands, for old times’ sake_ , for good measure. And the mere mention of coffee is cruel, but Tessa can’t remember the last time she’d had an honest sit-down with him. Sochi, probably, but.

She’s been parsing through the last months with Cynthia, and boiled down, there’s not much she truly remembers. It’s a haze; silver and disappointment and applause that sounds like pity. The only clarity she has is flashes of Scott, those odd moments when his eyes hadn’t been so angry. She’s trying to hold onto that; the feeling of their job well done and not the bitter aftertaste of their defeat. Her daughter won’t be raised as if she’s an accident, born of failure.

The blinders are coming off.

Her daughter perhaps, wouldn’t have Scott in her life, right then. But Danny is family, _Tessa’s_ family and her baby’s blood. And Tessa will be damned if she’ll let her feelings for Scott keep her baby from her birthright.

They agree to meet at the artisan café down the street from her apartment. (Everything is down the street, it feels like, and she’s not a big city girl, so many people in a space cordoned by traffic lights is exhausting. These days, all she does is nap. But she loves her creature comforts. Mostly, she loves that she can satisfy her cravings for Japanese cheesecake at all hours of the night, all on her own.)

“Anywhere, Tess. Whatever works,” he tells her, and for a heart-stopping moment, she wonders if something awful has happened for him to give so easily to what she wants. She shoves the thought away. If it was serious—Alma or Joe or Carol, Charlie or even Scott, they would’ve told her already.

Danny’s sitting at a table by the window, scrolling through his phone with one hand, tapping along to the blues tunes playing overhead with the other. It’s something she’s never seen from Scott, he’s always got his head up, watching people when he isn’t watching for her, but Danny’s got his head angled to the side and from this distance, he looks so like Scott, she can’t breathe for a moment.

( _Wasn’t._ Because he isn’t watching for her anymore.)

He sees her and he rises, his chair screeching along the floor.

“Why on earth would anyone live here?” he grumbles into her ear, wrapping her in a tight hug. “I’ve been here for all of an hour and the smog’s already turning my lungs black.”

The biggest of the Moir boys, she’d always loved his hugs. They’d been celebrations and consolations. They’d been homecoming. Tessa had never felt quite as safe anywhere else as she had in Danny’s arms, Scott notwithstanding, of course, but that’d always gone without saying. She’d told Scott once, when she’d been twelve, and he’d gotten so quiet, she’d felt suffocated, the possession, near-jealousy that’d started to test their bond, from both their parts, like tar, sticky and thick between them.

“I feel safer with you,” she’d reassured him. But she’s still not sure if he’d heard her.

(Cynthia makes her remember. The old, the beginning of _them_ , and she doesn’t understand why it’s important to talk about how she’d felt about that outgoing Moir boy, when that boy had ended up leaving her anyway.)

“I’ve missed you, Danny.” She hugs him back as tightly as she can.

It’s idle chitchat while they order and wait for their drinks to arrive. Danny’s drinking a double shot flat white, and she’s watching miserably as the barista pours out the shots of espresso. He’s looking at her, brows raised at her order of a tall glass of iced water with a fruit-topped angel food cake, and she squirms under his scrutiny. That she isn’t drinking coffee is unheard of. Even on the most regimented training diets, she’d found room for a couple of cups every day.

“Photoshoot coming up,” she lies. “Can’t risk any breakouts.”

He lets it go, because when they’ve settled into their seats across from each other, the throw pillow in her chair adjusted until it’s nested comfortably in the small of her back, there are bigger questions he needs answers to.

“If you missed us, then why’d you leave?”

Tessa schools her features into one of careful neutrality. She’d known this was coming. She’d known it the second she’d seen his name in her missed calls. “I’m starting school in a few weeks. I had to get settled in.”

He leans back in his chair. “You’re really going to do this?”

“Do what?”

“Keep bullshitting me,” and she’s made the mistake of catching his gaze, and he’s not Scott, but she knows he’ll see through her anyway.

“What do you want me to say?” she asks, feeling like a petulant child. “That I’m running away? Because I’m not.”

“Enlighten me, then. What are you doing?” he huffs, “You sold your house, Tess. You didn’t even tell any of us, you just sold your house and moved to Toronto, when a couple of months ago, you told me you’d been planning to go to Western.”

“Things changed.”

“Like what?”

“I was staying for him,” she says, too loudly. She looks away. “But there’s no point to that now.”

“So you’re just giving up on him, then?”

“I would never give up on him,” she says heatedly, “But he’s spiraling and right now I can’t be around that.”

Danny’s face crumples. “He’s not an alcoholic, Tess. He’s just hurting.”

“I know he’s not,” she says quietly, “I know he’d never do anything actually irresponsible. I know he’s not just throwing his life away. But he’s being reckless and angry, and I’ve taken so much of that…my entire life, it feels like, but I can’t do it anymore, Danny. I just can’t.”

“He’s a good kid, Tess. Don’t leave him. I don’t think he’ll survive it.”

Tessa shakes her head. “He’s not a kid. He’s a grown ass man, and I—” she chokes, “Don’t you think I want to keep him in my life? Shit, Danny, he’s been my entire life since I was nine years old, being ferried back and forth from Kitchener at the crack of dawn, every morning. But I can’t anymore. I just can’t.”

She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes, stifles the tears in her throat. “God, I didn’t want to do this here.”

“Tessa?” his voice is low and soothing, eerily like Scott’s when he’d had to talk her through the fire ravaging her legs. “Honey? What’s wrong?”

“I can’t,” she shakes her head, “I need to. Just wait for a couple of weeks, okay? I’ll get settled and then—”

“C’mon, T. I’m your big brother,” he cajoles, tugging gently at her hands. “You can tell me. What’s wrong?”

He wipes at her lower lashes, his thumb coming away smudged in black.

“You’re going to be an uncle,” she says, staring into her lap. “I’m pregnant.”

Stunned silence hangs between them, thick with questions he won’t ask. Doesn’t need to, because they both know exactly how things had gotten this bad between her and Scott.

“So you and Scott.” It’s not a question.

“Me and Scott,” she says, trailing her fingers in the condensation collected on the outside of her glass.

“You ran away because—Tessa, that’s his baby, too.”

It’s all the same; he has a right to get his life together, the baby could be his chance to fix things before he really ruins them. Her baby could be their chance at a happy ever after, but they don’t understand. Their baby shouldn’t carry the burden of holding them together, when they were really breaking apart.

She should’ve prepared cue cards. Or maybe a singular PowerPoint presentation with their entire family in attendance.

“You’re testing him,” Danny says at the end of a long silence, a quiet finality in the slump of his shoulders.

“My baby needs stability right now, and Scott needs the opposite. I don’t blame him for it, I understand it, even. I think…” she looks down at her hands in her lap, “When he’s ready, he’ll come find me. But I can’t put my life on hold for that. My baby needs me to focus on her, and that’s what I’m doing. It’s why I chose Toronto.”

“He’s always gone on about having kids someday. I just…does it have to be this way?”

“You’ve known me since I was a child. And you’ve known him for longer. You know what he’s like now, and you know how he gets when he’s angry and stubborn.” Tessa’s tired, so goddamned tired. “I just…please don’t tell him. Don’t do that to me. Don’t do that to my baby—your niece.”

“I won’t—yet. But if I can bring him back to you,” Danny swallows, “Will you let him in your life? Will you let him be a dad to your baby?”

“Can you do it?”

“I can at least try.”

He’s full of questions until Ari has called him three times, Robin growing increasingly noisy in the background of each call. Yes, she has a doctor. Yes, the baby is growing fine. Yes, she’s taking vitamins. No, she doesn’t have any back pain yet, though she supposes that will come soon. Yes, she’ll tell Alma and Joe. Of course she’ll let them, let her baby’s Uncle Danny in her life.

“Danny?” she tells him as they walk out. “I don’t want to shut him out. He has so much love in him, and I would never want to keep that from my baby. But I don’t know where that boy went. And right now?”

She shakes her head. “He’s no good for a child. You know that.”

“But he can be,” Danny shakes his head, “Tessa, he’s so good with Robin. Even better than me, sometimes. I just don’t want to see him miss out on his child’s life because of all this. Sochi ended badly as it is. We don’t need to make it worse.”

“Okay,” she says tiredly, “But my baby’s not going to be hurt because of him.”

“Of course,” he says, wrapping her tightly in a final hug. “Of course.”

She doesn’t hold her breath, but her chest feels tight, all the same.

 

 

Scott takes a radio broadcasting job in Winnipeg and his Facebook page is filled with photos from bars tagged with southern Manitoba locations. His friends are different, the girls are different, but it’s all the same. She removes him from her feed, and it doesn’t make a difference in anything that counts. He’s still doing whatever, whoever he wants. But those photos are bitter poison, and she’s taking care of herself.

Danny spends the weekend assembling furniture for her apartment, and they don’t talk about it, but when he hugs her goodbye, she feels his apology anyway.

“It’s okay, she tells him softly, patting his back. “I didn’t expect anything.”

He sits beside her at dinner with his parents the next weekend, loading her plate with greens—beans, broccoli, asparagus, peas, not stopping even when she aims her heel at his shin under the table. When Joe comments that she’s looking pale, he piles sliced steak—well-done—onto her plate. She shoves him with her shoulder, but he’s not laughing.

“Let us take care of you,” he says, solemnly.

Afterwards, tucked against the arm rest of the living room sofa, she nervously slides the black and white ultrasound photo towards Alma and Joe on the other side of the coffee table. “It’s too early to know for sure, but I’m pretty certain she’s a girl.”

Alma’s hands are shaking as she reaches to pick up the scan. Joe fumbles for her free hand, their twined hands clutching each other so hard, Tessa sees their skin turning white and bloodless. Silence echoes through the main level of the Moirs’ family home. Tessa could swear she hears a quiet wailing trapped in Alma’s chest as she stares and stares and stares at the photo.

It’s Joe that speaks first. “Is there no hope? For you and Scott to work things out?”

“I…” She wishes that they would stop asking about him, like it doesn’t only make things more difficult. And all at once, she wishes she could say yes. When she’s up at three in the night, vomiting her guts out, she wishes she could have him there. Holding her hair back, rubbing circles down her spine as he had that one awful weekend at Skate Canada International, when she’d had the food poisoning from hell.

She wishes she wasn’t so weak.

“Don’t,” Danny stops her with a shake of his head, “You can’t ask her that, Dad. None of us have the right to ask her that.”

“I’m going to give my baby the best life she possibly can,” Tessa says softly, “It’s why I moved to Toronto. And I know that keeps me away from my family, from you guys, but it’s not far. We’ll visit often. I’d like it if you were in her life.”

“My dad is…” Tessa looks at Joe. “I’d like it if she had at least one of her grandfathers in her life.”

“Gosh,” Alma’s voice quakes with unshed tears. “I really hope she takes after her mother and not her father. Robin is troublemaker enough for all the grandbabies.”

“No,” Tessa shakes her head.

They need to understand; speaking of her baby’s father as if he’s giving her defective genes isn’t the kind of attitude she wants around her daughter. It’s so easy to blame Scott for this mess, but it’s not productive. She’s thinking positive and looking to the future. Cynthia is helping, but she needs everyone in her daughter’s life to _understand_.

“It doesn’t matter who she takes after, all I have to do is make sure she’s never hurt the way we were. Scott was a good kid, an easy kid. My baby will be lucky if she gets at least some of what he had back then. I don’t want her to be like me. I don’t want her childhood to be difficult.”

“Oh honey,” Alma croaks, standing and walking over to where she sits beside Danny, holding her arms out. “Come here.”

Tessa falls into her embrace, wrapping her arms around Alma’s neck, pulling her down onto the couch beside her.

“Don’t you think it might be easier for you, if you let Scott get involved? Single parenting…I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

“Easier for me, maybe,” Tessa swallows. “But for her? Right now, Scott and I are no good for each other. And a child, _my baby_ deserves parents who have it together.”

“Okay,” Alma repeats, over and over again, as reassurance for Tessa or herself, Tessa doesn’t know. She strokes her hair, then pulls back so that Tessa’s looking at her, her eyelashes spiked and dark, her honey-coloured eyes hazy, the creases around them deeper than she remembers.

Sometime between Carmen and Sochi, Alma had aged, and Tessa can’t pinpoint when. She could’ve sworn she was paying attention.

“I understand. But Tessa, I need you to know: you don’t have to do this alone. This baby is our grandchild, and you’ve been my daughter for nearly two decades.”

“Whatever you need, whenever you need it,” Joe walks over and perches on the arm rest, rubbing a hand across her shoulders. “You call us, okay? Doesn’t matter if you’re in Toronto. Doesn’t matter if it’s late.”

“Thank you,” Tessa says, trying to smile.

“Nothing to thank us for,” Joe says quietly, a whisper over Alma’s quiet sobs.

The collar of her shirt is wet from Alma’s tears, and half of Tessa is sick with guilt for her part in this family’s grief. But the other half—the part of her that has her next two years planned and mapped down to the month, holds her ground. The loss of Scott as they’d known him is heartbreaking, and when she dwells on the boy who’d been the solid ground beneath her, even while they’d moved at breakneck speeds, her resolve—falters, a little bit.

And it shouldn’t, because her feet are on the ground now; skating is a danger to her baby and so is that life she’s trying so hard to leave behind, but it’s. All she’s known, and sometimes, her entire body feels like one massive bruise, torn apart by pain in a phantom limb that’d never been tangible anyway.

But she’s old hat at boxing up her pain and tucking it away. Her eyes remain dry, and she absorbs Alma and Joe and Danny’s grief, with the hope that in time they’ll see. That they aren’t to blame for Scott’s pain. That sometimes he needs to burn himself out, away from the people he loves. Because if he hurts them, he’ll hurt tenfold when the haze clears.

It’s for them. It’s for him.

This she knows; he’d rather lock himself up than hurt the people he loves, and it’s backwards, but that he’d chosen to leave almost gives her hope.

 

 

Her baby isn’t a secret.

Jordan’s full of scenarios and practical _what will you do’s_ when she tells her, and Tessa rolls her eyes a little bit, but the nagging makes her think. She’s a public figure and the year is still an Olympic one. Magazines are still reaching out with requests for photoshoots, with questions about the nature of the Tessa-and-Scott dynamic written in the fine print. She turns those down, and Scott’s voice over the Winnipeg radio waves must be enough to satisfy the definite, provincial border-thick wall between them, because eventually the questions die off.

It’s as she’d hoped and planned, because her baby isn’t a secret, but her paternity is private. She tells Jordan and Cara and her sisters, Aunt Carol and Charlie, who is strangled with anger and apology in equal parts. Jeff is a ball of righteous fury for weeks, tagging along on her nursery shopping trips, helping her choose a rocking chair—heavily cushioned, with rounded padding for her neck to rest—all while seething.

“He should be here,” he says darkly, chewing at his purple Booster Juice straw. “Instead of—this is his responsibility too.”

“I’m sure he’d be here if I’d told him,” she says, forcing levity into her voice.

“He went to elementary school. He can do the goddamned math.”

Tessa’s pregnancy isn’t public knowledge yet; there’s a ways to go before it starts becoming a question. Her body is softer than before, more curves than edges, but her stomach isn’t round enough for her baby to be visibly real. She’ll tell the world when she needs to, but not a moment sooner. Oversharing has never invited positivity, putting her life out there for scrutiny had done nothing to win them another Olympics. Her baby is _hers_ , prying eyes be damned.

Privately, there’s a photo of a positive pregnancy test and a copy of the ultrasound photo captioned with a wide-eyed blushing emoji that has a good hundred likes, and copious comments written in all capitals. The odd comment skirting around the question of her baby’s paternity is ignored, but for the most part, her friends on Facebook either know who her baby’s father is, or have the good sense not to ask. 

(Tucked into the list of likes is Scott’s name.

The notification shows up as a line in her email, his name in bold font. It’s still there when she opens the page a day later, her anxiety having given her a twitch in her leg for the better part of the day. A speech bubble from the world-shaped notifications icon, telling her that he’d liked her photo.

It’s a careless press of a button, and it mocks her.

Tessa holds her breath until she remembers that her baby needs her to breathe.)

“It’s okay, you know? I’m okay. I think…in time, he’ll find what he needs to, he’ll figure it out and then he’ll be around. It’s Scott. Not anyone else, it’s Scott. This…whatever he’s doing, it isn’t him.”

And she is. It’s her tired, regurgitated answer, but she really is. Okay, that is, she’s got a plan at least, and a jewellery deal in talks. It’s not Tiffany’s or Cartier, but it’s a paycheque. It’s creative control, incomplete in places, her hands off on half of the project, but some is better than none.

“That’s not an excuse. That’s not a reason for you to raise his child alone.”

“My child,” she snaps instantly. “I’m not doing anything for _him_. This child is mine. Before she’s his, she’s mine.” 

“I know, I know,” Jeff holds his hands out placatingly. “I’m just saying, it doesn’t seem fair that you have to be a single mom while he goes out and has the time of his life.”

“It is what it is,” Tessa says tiredly, and she’d wanted to do this differently too, get him a cake or a bouquet or something. But she needs a way to get him to stop, because this isn’t helping. “But she has her aunts and uncles and grandparents. A godfather, too. If you’ll have her— _us_.”

“I…” Jeff opens and closes his mouth a couple of times. “If you want me to…of course, Tess. I’d be honoured.”

Between him and Danny, her baby won’t lack for father figures in her life. She’ll have the best grandmothers, the best grandfather. The best aunts and uncles in Jordan and Charlie and Cara and Sheri. A rambunctious older cousin who will teach her all kinds of mischief as she gets older.  It takes a village to raise a child, and her baby will have so much love in her life, that she won’t even notice her biological father missing from every picture of her early childhood.

 

 

At the start of her first semester, her bump is barely visible and easily hidden by high waisted skirts and dresses belted under her breasts. Her first pair of super skinny maternity jeans are a gift from her mom, and they sit at the bottom of her pants drawer like a ticking time bomb.

She’ll need to wear pants with a waist that wide someday soon, made of elastic to stretch around her softening body, and Tessa curls into a ball on the couch while an old episode of Suits plays on tv, the poster-child for Olympic loser. Stuffing her face full of sweets on a pleather couch, watching reruns and wearing pants with elastic waistbands.

It isn’t her.

As if possessed, Tessa snaps to attention, sitting up with her back straight and shoulders squared. She shakes off her melancholy, takes her prenatal vitamins, smears half of an overpriced organic avocado on locally sourced wheat toast with her eggs, tucks her keys under a couch cushion and locks herself in her bedroom to stop herself from going out for some late-night cheesecake.

In the night, the press of Marina’s measuring tape pressing into the flesh of her midsection has her starting awake and dashing to the bathroom, dry heaving out of memory. Sticky with sweat, she wrestles the t-shirt off her body, standing in her underwear, in front of her bathroom mirror.

For better or worse, her abs are gone. Her never impressive breasts have swollen to a cup size larger, her legs are fleshy and foreign. The Olympics are over, and so are the days that every extra ounce of fat could account for every point left off their protocol.

Daylight brings rationality; Marina is a speck in her soon-distant past, and her baby is her ever-present future. The hard lines of her body were never meant to be preserved.

The maternity pants fit snugly around her softly curved stomach, the folded back of the elastic waistband supporting her back and _damn_. She takes the subway to the closest Thyme she can find in the gap between classes, and rummages through the racks for jeans in her size.

There’s one other customer in the store, a tall woman with a pronounced baby bump, dressed in a black pencil skirt and a blue peplum top, her curly hair pulled back in a soft knot at her nape. The skin of her nose is freckled and her lips have been painted a dark plum. There’s an id badge clipped to her waistband, swaying as she sorts through the dresses on the rack.

Tessa ducks past her to the jeans section, glancing around furtively before she finds a slim cut pair and holds them up to her waist to judge the length.

“If you loop an elastic through the snap of your regular jeans, you can make them work for a lot longer.” The woman says with a wink, and the jeans slip from Tessa’s fingers, falling in a crumpled heap over her peach painted toes and strappy sandals. “Babies are expensive as it is, without the added expense of a new maternity wardrobe. And don’t even get me started on nursing bras.”

“Oh,” Tessa says dumbly, “I was just.”

“How far along are you?” she asks, the lines around her eyes creasing kindly.

“I’m not…” Tessa starts out of reflex, fear seizing in her chest. Walking into a maternity clothing store as she’d been, no hats or sunglasses to speak of had been a mistake. She’s not a celebrity, but there’s still people who know who she is, she’d walked into a Shoppers Drug Mart and been greeted by her face immortalized as laughing down at Scott, splashed across a stack of magazines.

Her narrative is hers to control, and if it gets out like this, someone spotting her buying maternity pants, it would be over. But she’d been holding the pair up to her own waist, and the white t-shirt she’d thrown on that morning is her most ill-fitting. Her clothes are fitting tighter by the day.

It’s not a secret anymore.

“Sixteen weeks,” she says quietly. “Four months, I should say probably. And you?”

The woman’s name is Maria and she’s eight months along, still working unfortunately, but she’s trying to wrap up at least one project before she goes on maternity leave, or god knows what her bosses and her subordinates will say about her. She’s got a half dozen tips and takes Tessa around the store, pulling out leggings and skirts as she goes along. She pulls out her phone halfway, pausing momentarily to smile at the two little girls on her lock screen, before scrolling through Amazon and pulling up a page for multicoloured bra extenders.

This is her third kid; she’s got a dozen hacks and yoga and Lamaze class recommendations that Tessa might like to attend.

“Tessa,” Maria says with a gentle smile as the cashier rings up Tessa’s items, her own dress hanging from a bag strung around her elbow. “Parenthood is a privilege and a sacrifice. And I think…you might know something about that. Congratulations, momma.”

She asks if she might hug her, and when Tessa nods, she pulls her close, her bump hard against Tessa’s own. “Watching you skate all these years has been my privilege. Thank you. I hope your baby makes you as happy as skating did.”

Tessa’s heart jumps at her throat, nausea makes her head spin. She hadn’t thought Maria had known who she was, she’d been so friendly, hadn’t asked for a picture or an autograph, or who the baby’s father is, and she’d just thought she was safe. Pure idiocy, she sees now, because hasn’t she learned her lesson a hundred times over, about assuming and trusting without thinking?

But Maria pulls back, with her hands at Tessa’s shoulders and shakes her head. “Relax, honey. I may seem like a busybody, but I won’t be telling anyone.”

“Thank you,” Tessa breathes, “I’ll be making a statement soon, I’m just caught up in the how of it, is all. Please don’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t,” Maria promises, and Tessa wants to believe her so badly. But she’ll have to get ahead of this, tell the world as soon as possible. “I wish you all the best.”

Tessa swallows. “To you as well.”

She pulls a hoodie off the athleisure rack, tugs it over her head as she leaves, curling her shoulders into herself, in the hopes that no one will see.

 

 

There’re bubbles in her stomach, it makes her insides flip-flop. She asks Dr. Gu if it’s normal, and she’s answered with a kind laugh. Because yes, it’s normal and healthy, even, it’s her daughter moving inside of her. Daughter confirmed, by the wand sliding around the gel on her stomach, and Tessa’s heart has never been so full.

She’s in baby Gap for an hour afterwards, thumbing through full body onesies with a half dozen tiny buttons closing the front. One printed with tiny elephants, the other with little bunnies. So tiny and adorable, and when she thinks of putting her baby in these very clothes, holding her close to her chest, Tessa can’t stop grinning.

The family comes over that night; her mom and Alma and Joe, Cara and Carol, Danny with Ari and Robin. Jordan bleary-eyed in Australia and Charlie still in his pressed work shirt, on cellphone cameras. Jeff picks up a half dozen helium balloons with _it’s a girl_ scrawled across the foil, and Joe is greeted by them, flying at his face. Alma laughs and pulls them away, reading the words with a soft, _oh Tessa_ , before enveloping her in her arms.

“Our first granddaughter,” Joe says tugging on the string. “Imagine that.”

“My baby girl’s having her own baby girl,” Kate says, squeezing into Alma and Tessa’s embrace. They stay like that for a long moment, swaying gently, Tessa and her daughter held by her mothers.

Robin is confused and restless, climbing on top of the dining table and walking across to reprimands from his mother. When she’s had enough, she calls for Danny sharply, a little loudly, and Alma pinches her eyes shut. But Danny moves quickly, pulling his son off the table and sits down on the couch next to Tessa with him on his lap.

“Auntie Tess is having a baby, buddy. A little girl cousin for you to play with.”

“Just like mommy?” Robin shyly reaches out to poke at Tessa’s stomach. Tessa laughs and flattens his hand against her stomach.

“It’s a bit weird, isn’t it?”

He finds the flowers decorating Tessa’s dress more interesting, and he busies himself tracing their outline over the hardening line of Tessa’s baby bump.

“Congratulations,” Tessa says over Robin’s head. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to…” Danny hesitates. “Didn’t feel right to take the spotlight away from you.”

“Oh stop it,” Tessa shakes her head. “Ari’s going through all the same things I did.”

“But you did it alone.”

“Danny,” she admonishes, “Stop feeling guilty. Look at everything I have. Everything we have.”

He nods and agrees, but he and Alma and Joe and Cara and Carol, even Robin, asking her if she'd like a hug in his sweet high pitched voice, spend the evening hovering over her. Making sure she’s eating, stocking her fridge with groceries. Rearranging the furniture in her bedroom, when she mentions she’s looking to move her bed away from the window so she can get some sleep without the sun streaming through her gauzy grey curtains. Ari can barely stand to look at her, and Tessa alternates between asking her advice and offering her morning sickness remedies, but there’s a wall and Tessa doesn’t know how to breach it.

Danny tries ten-fold to fill a hole that isn't shrinking, but fading enough that it's just out of sight and nearly out of mind, and Tessa’s so, so, sorry.

 

 

She announces her pregnancy with a maternity t-shirt she designs herself; black cotton that hugs her bump, _made with love_ scrawled across her stomach in elegant cursive, worn for a photo posted on her bare-bones Instagram. It’s met with a meltdown from the fans, and enough questions about Scott that she has no choice but to turn her notifications off. They yell and dissect and speculate, and Tessa navigates with one eye cracked open, but the question of her baby’s paternity might as well be stamped on a billboard, in capitals and bold print.

_Does the baby belong to Scott?_

She retaliates with a picture of her gender-reveal balloons, of herself eating a chocolate Prairie Girl cupcake, the strawberry frosting kissing her lips. Before she can overthink it, she captions the photo with a sharp she’s mine, and that she hopes to be as good a parent to her daughter as her own mother still is.

(She has a half dozen names bookmarked for her baby girl, she sounds them out each night as she drifts off to sleep. Zoey, Serena, Lucille. All beautiful names but none of them right.)

The rest of the media follows in a whirlwind. Her email is flooded with requests to mass produce the t-shirt in the photograph. Gossip columnists and figure skating media alike ask for statements as to who her baby’s father is. She ignores those, and thumbs through the collaboration requests. Her follower count seemingly doubles overnight, and then doubles again. With the spotlight that’s all of a sudden burning dots into her eyes and heating her skin, the brand deals and sponsorship requests return, ten-fold.

Any publicity is good publicity for them, even if it’s all wrong.

When they’ve kept her up for a night and then some, Jeff hands her a short stack of business cards for managers and PR agencies who might be able to handle these opportunities for her, while she studies for exams, and she laughs it off. Because those are for celebrities, and she’s a retired Olympian, a grad school student in an insanely expensive program, and a mother. Signing away a percentage of the money that she doesn’t even have in hand yet, when she’s got an entire life depending on her to provide would be—lunacy.

Still, the requests flood her mailbox, and she’s torn in half, attempting to study and cling to the beginning of a maybe-career. She carves out time for therapy, spends a half hour each night writing in her journal reminding herself that no matter how it had all turned out, none of it had been because she hadn’t been enough. Because she is. Smart enough to maintain her GPA, charming enough to land interviews. Loving enough to make up for her mom’s sacrifices. Good enough a parent that Alma and Joe and Danny won’t blame her for keeping Scott away.

It’s not unlike writing lines as childhood punishment. She’s not sure if that’d ever worked on anyone--or if it would work for her. But it keeps her focused through exams, it serves as a reminder to not just do her best, but to actually do well. To be patient when her daughter jolts her awake in the middle of the night with what feels like a foot against her kidneys. When she has Tessa running out four times through an exam to go to the bathroom, under the suspicious glare of the invigilator’s hawk-like gaze burning a hole through the stall door.

She will be patient and she will be great—she poses for pictures in her maternity line, Virtue by Thyme, and tries not to laugh hysterically at the irony of the name. A too-young, never-married single mother; it’s about the most non-virtuous thing she’s ever heard of.

But, she reminds herself, that school of thought is old and unwelcome in the home she’s preparing for her daughter. She poses for ads and shills the clothes to her followers who still ask after Scott. But it’s punctuated with appreciation for her maternal glow and the clothes she’d helped to design. In the end, the feedback for the content on her publicity outlet doesn’t truly matter. She collects paycheques and hoards the money like a miser.

She’s not asking for a penny from anyone, and her baby girl will want for naught.

 

 

Carolina; Tessa rolls the name around on her tongue. Strong in Italian, joy in English. For Carol who’d set her on this beautiful path, long before she’d learned of how beauty coupled itself with pain. For that long-ago time when she’d been enough for everyone.

“Carolina,” she says softly, her voice a whisper in her silent apartment.

Her baby flutters inside her.

“Carolina Virtue,” she says, louder this time, with conviction.

 (It’s her baby’s name.)

 

 

The Braxton-Hicks contractions start a month before she’s due, but Tessa doesn’t get nervous until she’s two weeks before her due date, and Dr. Gu confirms that she’s closer to giving birth than they’d originally predicted. Carolina is cradled low in her pelvis, having shifted from over her kidneys. Tessa’s lower back hurts like it never has, her ankles have moved past swollen and gone straight to fat.

(If Igor’s measuring tape could see her now.)

“She’s not dilated yet, but the plug is gone,” Dr. Gu tells her intern, who scribbles down a note in her chart, diligently.

She’s poking and prodding Tessa, with latex covered fingers, that’d been shiny with clinical smelling lube, before she’d pushed them inside.

“Is my cervix soft?” Tessa asks, fists clenched at her side to stop herself from squirming. It’s not the first time she’s endured a cervical exam, and it likely won’t be her last. She still hasn’t grown comfortable with such a clinical brand of something that should be intimate.

Home-like decor and soft cotton examination gowns don’t take away from how awful this part of her doctor’s visits are.

Dr. Gu pulls out her hand and snaps off the gloves. “It is,” she says, “But it doesn’t mean your little girl will be making her big debut anytime soon. This close to your due date, it can be any time. Be it sooner or later. Your cervix can start dilating, without you even noticing it. I would keep your go-bag at hand at all times, though. And call me if anything changes.”

She shows Tessa how she can safely examine her cervix at home, and though Tessa tries her hardest the next day, she can’t bring herself to repeat it. It’s been a near lifetime since anyone had touched her so intimately, save for Dr. Gu and her baby blue gloves. In the bathroom, her thick right leg propped up on the edge of the tub, her ankles swollen twice over, barely able to see over her bump, Tessa’s body is a stranger to her. She doesn’t know where to start.

For Carolina, she reminds herself. But her eyes flit to the body length mirror (and why had she ever thought putting that mirror there could be anything other than a giant mistake) and she cannot.

In any case, Carolina doesn’t give her any signs that she’d like to come out soon, alternating between bruising her kidneys and happily jumping on her bladder. Enough that Tessa takes to keeping laminated notecards on her bathroom counter, sneaking Financial Reporting and Analysis to get back the time she loses in her runs to the washroom.

It isn’t until her walk to campus for her last final of the spring semester, that the now-usual pressure in her lower abdomen turns to full blown cramps, deeper than the Braxton-Hicks had ever been, reverberating through her body. They’re far in between, the pain manageable enough that she can breathe through it. But close enough that nerves dampen her palms.

It’s not too soon. She’d crossed that line weeks ago, if Carolina were to come now, there’s no reason for her to be anything but perfectly healthy. But it’s the last exam of Tessa’s semester, of her academic year. If she doesn’t write it now, she’ll have to defer it to the next round of exams at the end of summer.

She’ll have to remember every bit of Supply Chain Management she’d crammed into her brain over the last couple of nights, and she’d have to do it with a newborn attached to her hip.

It won’t work. She needs to write this exam.

The pain turns her body inside out. She clicks her pen to the cramps wrenching her apart, keeping time to the peaks of the pain, biting her lip to keep herself from crying out, gnawing until she tastes blood, bitter and metallic in her mouth. For the first hour, she breathes through the contractions, focusing on the page numbers on the bottom corners of the exam booklet. Counting down with every question finished, every page turned. She reads each question, thinks each answer through, three times over.

All of this would be for nothing if she fails.

But by the last hour, sweat dots her forehead, the classmates seated around her glare every time a low moan escapes her. The invigilator stops her with a hand on her shoulder, asking if she’s alright, but Tessa’s got three questions left and no energy to answer. The last of the multiple choice, she circles arbitrarily, having read half of each question, hoping against hope that it’ll be enough.

Her legs buckle when she pulls herself up. She clutches the table to ground herself, breathes through the pain.

(Her anchor is gone. She flounders.)

Beck taxi picks up on one ring, but there’s been a collision at Harbord and St George. It’ll take them fifteen minutes to get to her, and Tessa bites the inside of cheek when she can’t swallow another groan. She calls Dr. Gu.

“My contractions are ten minutes apart, and they last—” the next one hits, and Tessa scrambles for a hold, clutching a wrought iron railing, her knees trembling. They last a lifetime. Tessa counts: “Sixty seconds.”

“I’m at St. Mike’s already. I’ll meet you in the emergency room,” Dr. Gu says, ever efficient.

Tessa doesn’t have her go bag, she has no change of clothes. The soft cotton onesies her mom and Alma had given her for Carolina’s first days remain tucked into the pocket of her duffle, sitting by the door of her apartment that she won’t make it back to. All she has is a bag full of cue cards and notebooks, multicoloured pens and highlighters. A Kors scarf tied around the shoulder strap, a cardigan draped across the open top, she’d brought along just in case.

She has nothing. She climbs into the taxi, the top of her head grazing the car’s door frame; with nothing.

“Ma’am, are you alright?” the driver asks, both hands clutching the steering wheel, eyes flitting too-frequently to his rear-view mirror.

“I’m fine,” Tessa bites out.

She isn’t.

He’s supposed to be here. Like he’d promised in rink locker rooms and gyms, after dance classes and on drives across the border. As he’d vowed, on Marlene’s couch after Vancouver, as they’d patched over the fabric of their partnership, rent in two by her broken body and his fear. As he’d been, holding her hand through surgery and physio the second time around, teaching himself to match her stride as she’d retaught her muscles to move.

 _No matter what_ , he’d promised at Sochi.

Her teeth break the skin on the inside of her cheek as she clamps her jaws together, fighting through the next contraction. They’re growing closer together, the respite she gets between the waves growing shorter with each peak. The taxi driver leaves his car stalled and helps her to the door of the emergency room, supporting her back with one arm, and holding her hand with the other.

“Ma’am, is there anyone I can call for you?” he asks, as Tessa’s fingers crush his hand.

“No,” Tessa chokes out, prying her fingers lose. “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

She’d studied Umbrellas their last good summer, and she hadn’t understood. How Genevieve could love Guy as much as she had, and not waited for him. Not trusted that he would’ve come back for her, when they’d loved since childhood. When they’d been with each other through—everything. When he’d gone for a reason, when they’d made promises to each other.

Guy had gone the rest of his life, not knowing that he’d had a child with Genevieve, and she hadn’t understood. How a story of the children who’d loved each other so could’ve ended so cruelly.

(The Tessa of that long-ago summer hadn’t known loss.)

She’d danced with Scott to _ne me quitte pas_ echoing through the Gothenburg arena. He’d left her, afterward.

He’d left her again.

Dr. Gu is waiting at triage, nurse and wheelchair in tow, paperwork filled out and faxed over by the receptionist from her practice. It’s the finish line; Tessa barely makes it.

“You’re doing great, Momma, hang in there,” she says, helping Tessa into the chair.

“I’m not,” Tessa says around the lump in her throat, her vision blurring, tears slipping over the corner of her mouth leaving a salty aftertaste. “I can’t do this.”

 _I want you to stay_ , she’d told him under the spotlight, she’d held him in her arms and told him she’d loved him with every part of her body. She’d bled for his loyalty, she’d fought pain for his loyalty, and that’d meant something. What they’d had; it’s supposed to have meant something.

She needs her partner.

“Remember the classes, Tessa,” Dr. Gu coaches. “Breathe like you’ve practiced. You’ve got this.”

The hospital room stinks of rubbing alcohol, the bedsheets are a generic baby pink for the maternity ward. It’s an echo of a hospital room past, of promises up in the air and an uncertain future with two-to-one odds that it would all go horribly wrong. He hadn’t been there then, either. She remembers because when he’d been there, the odds hadn’t mattered. They’d done what they’d set out to do.

They should’ve gotten out while they’d been ahead. She should’ve gotten out. She should’ve told him about the baby, future, consequences be damned.

Her water breaks in a gush between her legs, the fluid soaking her jeans.

“No,” Tessa breathes, “No, it’s…not. I can’t.” But no one hears her.

“Get her gowned and prepped,” Dr. Gu barks, staring at her watch with a hand on Tessa’s stomach. “She’s in active labour.”

She wants Scott. The pain rips a sob from her chest. _She wants Scott._

Her clothes and undergarments are shucked, a starched cotton gown threaded through her arms and tied at her back. Nurses help her up onto a gurney and wheel her down the hallway as another contraction shudders through her body, her knuckles turning white as she clutches the rails of the gurney.

She won’t scream. Her cries can’t be the first thing Carolina hears in this world. Screaming had never done her any good, anyway, never summoned him to her. When he’d been there, he’d been present, and when he hadn’t. She could’ve made buildings tremble, and it wouldn’t have mattered. And she’d rather have him physically absent than there, but not.

(She’d lain on a physiotherapy bench alone, her arm draped over her eyes, soaking up her tears, sobs wracking her body because they were going to lose. He’d been with Jessica, then.)

(The sickening familiarity of the cramp shredding her legs had set in halfway through Carmen. She’d swallowed her tears and whispered to him, barely legible through the trills of the music that she couldn’t do it. He’d skated it off with her, walked her through it. Told her that it’d be okay.

He’d been with Cassandra, then. But at that moment he’d belonged to her.)

In the delivery room, she’s hoisted onto the table, her legs are guided apart, the pressure in her pelvis forcing her muscles to push even before Dr. Gu crouches between her spread legs, probing at her with gloved fingers, and nodding encouragingly.

“Almost there, Tessa! When the next contraction hits, I’m going to need you to give me a big push.”

The pressure peaks, and Tessa pushes with everything she has, fighting through the agony even as her body feels ripped in two. _We’ll be okay_ , he’d promised her. After her second surgery, before she’d even made it back to the ice. When her physio had pushed her until she’d broken, choking on sweat and bile, her legs like cinderblocks. You can do this, he’d reminded her.

_You’re the strongest person I know._

Carolina Suzanne Virtue comes into Tessa’s world with an ear-splitting shriek. Red faced and wrinkled, with a shock of dark hair. Fist clenched, legs squirming as if she’d fought her way into this world. Tessa cradles her to her chest, and she quiets, pressing a tiny hand to Tessa’s sternum, breathing steadily, pulling Tessa to follow.

Tessa’s vision clears. What she’d lost to Sochi had no meaning anymore. Scott could give and take away as he pleased. Her daughter is a part of her she’ll never lose.

 _Thank you so much,_ he’d said, eyes closed and breathing hard as the foundation of the Coliseum had shaken with the applause. For the gold, for the blood, sweat, tears she’d poured into their dream.

Scott won’t come. (She’ll be fine.)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> blame Jazz. :D
> 
> if you've made it this far, i'd like to sincerely apologize. the situation's not great now, but it may get better, if that helps? in any case, you may have noticed that this little (big) fic is now part of a series. this is because the next installment of this will be posted as an external one-shot of sorts. it will be in Scott's POV, and given that my concept for this is Tessa-centric, i didn't want to mash everything together. it's been in the works for a bit and a half, and has an unofficial name that i won't share here (because spoilers). things are bleak right now, and i know Scott seems to be a problem and a half, but i promise he's got a side to this story, and that little one-shot might help us all understand that a little bit. 
> 
> i have plans for 3 Scott POV pieces in this universe, fyi ;)
> 
> you guys have been so great and supportive, and i want to thank each and every one of you who's commented and sent me messages. i'm a bit of a social media hermit, but i'm most always on [twitter @ladyfriday87](https://twitter.com/ladyfriday87) (also i have a cc now, for another project, but feel free to use it, since i'm more likely to see messages on there, vs tumblr :P
> 
> also, the credit for the "made with love" tee that Tessa used in this chapter to announce her pregnancy goes to [@vmimagines](https://twitter.com/vmimagines) on twitter. thank you so much for the inspiration! the visual:
> 
> until the next, dear friends. which will hopefully be a lot sooner than the space between the first little bit i posted and this larger bit. thank you for reading! <3

**Author's Note:**

> if you've gotten this far, i owe you an apology. feel free to yell at me on twitter at ladyfriday87. :) thank you for giving me your time. until the next! <3


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